A creepy tale from North Carolina is making the rounds on social media and causing a huge stir in the paranormal community. Remarkably, this one comes with details, a genuine 911 distress call, and police reports. This isn’t your average ghost tale. It is considerably weirder. Trying to debunk it would be a lost cause.
I started hearing bits of this story in the past few days. It was described as the story of a cryptid that jumped in a truck. It seemed outrageous. Considering how difficult it is to find reliable sources online these days, the Carolina Case Files YouTube channel has a real life presenter who was really at the location and had really gathered the pieces. They delivered a solid report. Their video (necessary viewing) is linked below, but here is the story:
A young man driving a pickup truck was travelling on Route 210 north near Currie, NC just before 11 PM on July 31, 2021. While still moving, he places a call to Pender County 911 to report that he saw what appeared to be a man on the roadside, bleeding from the head. The witness, clearly upset, reported seeing red streaks on the torso, with the man just staring at the driver as he passed.
A half a minute later, as the dispatcher continued to talk to the driver, there was an audible thump on his end. He swore and yelled that something was in the bed of the truck. Then he screamed, “It’s not human, it’s not human!” and he accelerated. The dispatcher continued to ask for information as he tells her he slammed on the brakes, knocking the thing over the hood and onto the road.
He took off down the road again. The dispatcher tried to get him to say what he thought the thing was, but he couldn’t. He rejected her idea that it might have been a turkey, insisting that it didn’t have feathers but was pale, light-colored. He continued on, admitting to the dispatcher he was too shaken and freaked out to stop, until he got to a store on Route 421 several minutes later. During the call, he ticked off landmarks to indicate where he was. He waited several minutes at the store for the arrival of police and an EMT crew.
The officers had him take them to the spot where he saw the bleeding man and had the encounter with the mystery thing in the truck. There was nothing found. The truck, however, apparently had scratch marks on the roof.
Story known for years
The story has just spread widely on social media, showing up on websites and social media, even though it took place in 2021. The incident was known in the area, spread by friends of the driver or the responders. However, the witness didn’t want to tell this story; he wanted to forget it. Carolina Case Files followed up on the details and tracked him down, convincing him to recollect what happened. They posted the video below on September 13, 2025 including interviews with the witness and the sheriff.
The witness, still wishing to remain anonymous and referred to as “T”, recounts the story with additional detail about the first encounter – what has been interpreted as a Civil War ghost soldier near the Moore’s Creek Battlefield – and the subsequent truck incident. The two entities are assumed to not be related. Paranormalists, however, contend that there is a history of spooky encounters in this area making it a window area.
The driver states that he could see the thing in the truck when he turned on the bed lights. Its head was at the back window. He described it as having a white face with sunken eyes and skin stretched over the skull. After it was ejected from the truck, he saw it stand up on the road. He says it had an excessively thin “scrawny” long body, like a human but stretched out, about 7-feet tall.
Comparing the official record with the story, some inconsistencies emerged. Carolina Case Files made a follow-up video noting an error they made in the time stamp of the call, and explaining that in the 4 years that had passed, the witness no longer had the photo evidence because he wanted to move past this incident forever. The host, Rusty Martin, assured the audience that this was definitely a recorded incident, just as described. No hoaxing. They had obtained the 911 recording and police reports through regular investigative channels. They also recreated the trip along the same route while playing the extended version of the call. The timeline matched. The police apparently had used a drone to search for reported entities but found nothing.
BroBible, a site I normally refuse to link to because it’s ad-heavy clickbait, actually did a decent summary of the case here.
“And all I see is this just this super scrawny long body just fly over my truck in a ball, rolling,” T recalls. “As I’m swerving to the left, I see it stand up. And it is easily taller than that truck. I’m 5′ 10”. The truck is about 2 inches taller than I am. And this thing was easily, like, maybe 7 feet. And, as I pass it, I look in my mirror, and I see it bolt to the left into the woods.”
“It looked like somebody took a normal human and stretched them out, starting with the limbs,” he says. “Abnormally long legs and arms. And it just took off into the woods.”
The Rake
It’s one thing to claim to see a roadside ghost – one of many thousands of similar experiences reported worldwide. I have nothing to say about that other than it’s interesting. But the truck entity is really intriguing. If not for the recording, I’d have a hard time imagining anything like the second part of this account really occurred. We can speculate all day about what reasonably might have happened. That’s not the point. The point is the story is being interpreted as an encounter with a pale crawler, a rake, a shrink-wrapped humanoid monster. And people are eating it up.
I’m not going to dance around the fact that rakes are made up monsters. There is a whole genre of hairless elongated humanoids including Slenderman, gray aliens, the “tall man”, etc. Its name comes from its rake-like claws. We know the rake is fiction. It was created in 2005 when writers on 4chan collaborated to create a monster. And it caught on. It became a pop cryptid, usually supernatural, always menacing. It’s a form that people seem to “see” a lot, just like the hairy man. Stories, art and videos are shared everyday about the array of pale crawlers. That form fits this story exactly.
I don’t know what this driver saw, and we likely will never know. This tale does not make the rake real. Could a deer or another animal have run into his truck? Was he already so upset that he misinterpreted the awful incident that followed the first? How can we account for his description of the monster’s face and height? We can’t. We can only speculate. I won’t do that.
This story has legs; it will inject megawatts of energy into the haunted lore of this area. There is little value in making the effort to “explain” it because most people don’t want an explanation. They want the story. This gripping, amazing account is what it is: a real life paranormal tale.
Post Script 28-Sept-2025: I hear a lot of people commenting that this is a hoax. That’s always a possibility. If it is a hoax, it involves several people over a long time. The evidence at least shows that this story was circulated as early as December 2024. So Carolina Case Files would have had to make up a series of facts and make it match with existing times and places. And the Sheriff would be lying. That’s a big deal. Police reports aren’t available online, and likely because the person wished to remain anonymous, that report it’s floating around for everyone to see. If additional evidence were to show up that disputes the claims – such as local residents reporting it was a manufactured tale, or that some aspect of the interview video were faked – then the likely conclusion shifts.
Sometimes the skeptic looks ridiculous by saying “it’s a hoax!”, accusing someone of making it up when the hoax would involve a considerable number of people whose reputation would be on the line. That’s why I don’t see hoax as an obvious answer here. I think something happened to this guy; we just don’t know, and may never know, what that was.
7-Oct-2025: Now the story has made it to several other sources and even Snopes has checked into it. As usual, it takes a week or so to rise to wider coverage. So, yeah, all you doubters, the caller didn’t hoax this, as I stated above.
29-Oct-2025: Check out the Skeptoid episode that covers this story.
I thought it was a story about some sort of fishing bait – then I realised where I was.
I’m tall and skinny (I prefer strapping!).
I’m bald and have sunken eyes (I prefer deep eyes!).
My skin is pale even for a Gaelic-born son. My arms and legs are long but not strangely so. I’ve never been to America but more than once I’ve leaped onto the bed of a truck and beat upon the roof. The grouping of disparate myths about the gaunt and agile and very corpse-ish fiend probably filled the gaps in the vision of the incident. But that’s just my guess.
You jumped into the bed of a truck traveling 55-60mph? Impressive.
Shouldn’t we consider hoaxing?
That simply does not seem reasonable here.
makes me wonder if it was a bear with mange, they are really weird looking without fur and have been confused w cryptids before. NC and SC both have local black bear populations.
Issue we don’t see being addressed: the speed at which “T” was driving when 1st seeing whatever it is. He passes it – and a “half minute passes” and suddenly “with an audible thump” it’s on/in the bed of the truck. How far had he driven in 30 seconds? One-quarter, one-third, half a mile? That’s a considerable leap-of-distance for anything to make! Or had it bounded immediately and quietly onto the truck at first sighting, waiting half-a-minute before making its presence audible? Have never heard of a bear – or any other known animal native to NC – that’s able to jump aboard the tailgate of a vehicle traveling 40-60MPH.
An excellent point. The best I can imagine is that animals running across the road can hit the vehicle going at that speed. I’ve nearly had that happen to me – the deer almost hit me, not me hitting the deer. But the driver didn’t say he saw anything like that.
I’m not following why you say a hoax would have involved several people being in on it. Why couldn’t the guy have made a fake 911 call to the police as he was driving? He could even have been on DMT and made the call in earnest.
Yeah, that’s an option. There was no indication that anyone else was in the vehicle with him. Unless the sheriff and Carolina Case Files are lying, he met with police and EMTs were also called. He was really driving, I think that’s fair to say, because of the timing involved. He would have had to make up the “thump” and reaction on the spot. That’s possible but really reaching, especially in light of what followed. If he made all this up, why file a police report and then try to bury the story? It’s more plausible to accept there was a genuine incident that he had, whatever it may have been, than the alternative – he wasted hours in the middle of the night just to punk the cops and not speak of it for several years.
while the story about the rake isnt real the fact still stands that there was still a real 911 call and law enforcement was alerted and you can clearly hear things hiting his truck
Good discussion, it’s not always easy to weigh various pieces of evidence and decide the likelihoods.
One of the things that can weigh on me, maybe too much, is my habit of never underestimating hoaxers.
I lived just across the road from that store at Malpass Corner for a while and I know that area fairly well. The timing and landmarks sound about right. It might help to know that most folks out that way habitually drive 10-15 mph over the posted 55 limit, but also will commonly brake hard and slow to a crawl when anything looks off. It’s a two-lane blacktop in good condition. Also worth mentioning, I think, is that the caller and dispatcher have perfect local accents and typical local social speech patterns. That’s a remarkably conservative area out there. Lots of church-going folks. Not a whole lot of fat paychecks. It’s not the kind of place I’d deem likely to produce a sophisticated hoax. As to what that guy might have seen, I haven’t the foggiest idea. No amount of mange would be likely to cause a local to mis-identify a bear. Especially if they saw it run, as bear may stand on their back legs for a little while, but they’ll drop down on all four to run.
I drive this road almost every day and I would 1000000% believe something existed like that out there. This area is also about 2-3 miles from the house they used for the original The Conjuring & I Know What You Did Last Summer. It’s a very old area and this isn’t the first odd story I’ve heard out there.
I’ve heard of this story. Interesting one. Scared living shit outta me when I heard the High pitch in the sound of his voice as it went high in the second time he said “That’s Not Human”. That was real fear in that pitch. Imagine him walking through there at that time of night and seeing that instead of driving and getting on the phone to 911 and reporting it.